6 Current and Next-Gen Space Gadgets

Honeybee Robotics develops autonomous tools and components for Mars rover missions and earth satellites. Its engineers are also inventing the next generation of gear to explore both our solar system and extreme environments on earth.

The Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) is part of the instrument suite on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They launched in 2003 in June and July, respectively. Spirit has been silent since March 22, 2010, and Opportunity is exploring the 262-foot-diameter Santa Maria crater. The drill has a spinning brush attached so it can bore just a few millimeters into rocks and brush away the powder to reveal the fresh rock beneath. That fresh rock is what the rest of the rover's instrument suite tries to get at for testing. The self-sharpening bit is coated with resin and microdiamonds. Friction from use slowly shears layers of resin away to reveal more rock-cutting microdiamonds beneath. Though the RAT was designed for three deployments, it soldiered through 15 grindings in the Spirit rover before it quit and has ticked off 38 and counting on the Opportunity rover.To determine what tasks are feasible, and useful, for its rover to attempt, NASA asks Honeybee scientists to take the tool through mock tests in the Manhattan lab. By drilling into rocks here in their lab, researchers can judge the amount of energy that it takes to drill into similar rocks on Mars. Cross referencing that with the composition and chemical data that the rover collects can tell them about how the rocks have weathered. If, say, water had seeped into the rock and frozen, it would have weakened the rock and made it easier to drill into.

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The Everlasting Drill

The Everlasting Drill

The Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) is part of the instrument suite on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They launched in 2003 in June and July, respectively. Spirit has been silent since March 22, 2010, and Opportunity is exploring the 262-foot-diameter Santa Maria crater. The drill has a spinning brush attached so it can bore just a few millimeters into rocks and brush away the powder to reveal the fresh rock beneath. That fresh rock is what the rest of the rover's instrument suite tries to get at for testing. The self-sharpening bit is coated with resin and microdiamonds. Friction from use slowly shears layers of resin away to reveal more rock-cutting microdiamonds beneath. Though the RAT was designed for three deployments, it soldiered through 15 grindings in the Spirit rover before it quit and has ticked off 38 and counting on the Opportunity rover.

To determine what tasks are feasible, and useful, for its rover to attempt, NASA asks Honeybee scientists to take the tool through mock tests in the Manhattan lab. By drilling into rocks here in their lab, researchers can judge the amount of energy that it takes to drill into similar rocks on Mars. Cross referencing that with the composition and chemical data that the rover collects can tell them about how the rocks have weathered. If, say, water had seeped into the rock and frozen, it would have weakened the rock and made it easier to drill into.

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Cooking and Drilling

Cooking and Drilling

A Mars science laboratory rover, which is scheduled to launch next year, will transfer soil samples it collects to ovens, where it will heat them to 1800 F (1000 C) and analyze their composition. That transfer can be a delicate and energy-intensive ordeal. For future missions, Honeybee is re-imagining how the rover will drill with some interesting tweaks that are still too new for launch. One is simply to change where they put the heating elements. "Instead of bringing the sample to the oven, why not just put the oven near the drill tip?" asks Stephen Gorevan, Honeybee's co-founder.

The engineers are also experimenting with moving other instruments, like miniature cameras and infrared sensors, to the drill tip itself. Those kinds of modifications are in research now. "These are nascent technologies that would have to be hardened before NASA would take it on a mission," Gorevan says.

The Everlasting Drill

The Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) is part of the instrument suite on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They launched in 2003 in June and July, respectively. Spirit has been silent since March 22, 2010, and Opportunity is exploring the 262-foot-diameter Santa Maria crater. The drill has a spinning brush attached so it can bore just a few millimeters into rocks and brush away the powder to reveal the fresh rock beneath. That fresh rock is what the rest of the rover's instrument suite tries to get at for testing. The self-sharpening bit is coated with resin and microdiamonds. Friction from use slowly shears layers of resin away to reveal more rock-cutting microdiamonds beneath. Though the RAT was designed for three deployments, it soldiered through 15 grindings in the Spirit rover before it quit and has ticked off 38 and counting on the Opportunity rover.

To determine what tasks are feasible, and useful, for its rover to attempt, NASA asks Honeybee scientists to take the tool through mock tests in the Manhattan lab. By drilling into rocks here in their lab, researchers can judge the amount of energy that it takes to drill into similar rocks on Mars. Cross referencing that with the composition and chemical data that the rover collects can tell them about how the rocks have weathered. If, say, water had seeped into the rock and frozen, it would have weakened the rock and made it easier to drill into.

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Cooking and Drilling

A Mars science laboratory rover, which is scheduled to launch next year, will transfer soil samples it collects to ovens, where it will heat them to 1800 F (1000 C) and analyze their composition. That transfer can be a delicate and energy-intensive ordeal. For future missions, Honeybee is re-imagining how the rover will drill with some interesting tweaks that are still too new for launch. One is simply to change where they put the heating elements. "Instead of bringing the sample to the oven, why not just put the oven near the drill tip?" asks Stephen Gorevan, Honeybee's co-founder.

The engineers are also experimenting with moving other instruments, like miniature cameras and infrared sensors, to the drill tip itself. Those kinds of modifications are in research now. "These are nascent technologies that would have to be hardened before NASA would take it on a mission," Gorevan says.

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Going Deep

NASA's rovers currently drill mere millimeters to centimeters, but future missions may explore the solar system's subterranean ice and seas, requiring the ability to drill deep. Jupiter's Europa, for example, may be covered in liquid salt water—and if that's the case, it could also be home to some aquatic aliens. But that water is capped with a layer of ice. To get through it, a probe would need a drill that plunges dozens or maybe hundreds of meters and uses extremely little power. "It would have to use as little power as possible—just a few watts—and be completely autonomous," Gorevan says.

Honeybee has a drill design it thinks could work. It's called the Inchworm because of the way it moves: It clamps onto the sides of the borehole as it drills, then lowers itself into the space it created below and drills again. One of the questions now is how to clear debris from the hole. A derrick is too bulky to launch, and an auger, like you'd find on an ordinary electric drill, is impractical—it would have to be dozens of meters long to reach outside of the hole. Ideas the engineers are considering include flushing the debris out or shuttling it by walking the drill up and down the borehole.

If the drill were to go deeper than 300 feet, having a long tether back to the spacecraft would be unwieldy. Instead, the drill could get its power from an internal radioisotopic thermoelectric generator and venture out on its own.

That kind of low-power drilling isn't practical, or necessary, on earth, where power is easier to come by. But some of the innovations in robotic deep drills do have earthly significance. The multinational mining company Rio Tinto has approached Honeybee with interest in autonomous drilling robots. The robots would be outfitted with suites of sensors for real-time monitoring and analysis of potential new mining sites.

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The Ice-Collection Hack

Honeybee solved a problem on the Mars Phoenix rover mission before it actually became a problem. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had planned to scrape Mars ice with a rover's scooper to take samples, but Honeybee's engineers realized it probably wouldn't work because ice–soil mixtures at minus 80 C can be harder than concrete. To prove it, they turned to the Army Corps of Engineers to test the scoop in a special cold-temperature compression machine that replicated Mars temperatures. As they had suspected, the scoop could not scratch the ice.

Honeybee's fix was to attach a retractable rasp to the back of the scoop. "It's just like the kind you'd find at Home Depot," says Jason Herman, director of Honeybee's electromechanical components and actuators group. The inch-long rasp is spring-loaded and folds into a cavity at the base of the scoop. It powders the ice like a spinning power sander; the scoop gathers the shavings.

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Steering Mini Satellites

Satellites and the International Space Station use devices called control-moment gyroscopes (CMGs) to adjust the crafts' attitude, which is to turn and steer them. But those CMGs are too big for nano and other miniature satellites, so Honeybee has made them tiny. The company's small CMGs, still in development, could someday fit into hypothetical miniature defense satellites. They make for more nimble satellites that can quickly reposition as they track fast-moving objects.

This is how they work: A flywheel enclosed in a cubic frame rotates side-to-side on a gimbal axis, which changes the momentum of the spinning flywheel and generates torque. The principle is the same as that of a free-spinning bicycle tire. If you give the tire a hard spin while it's off the ground, then turn the handlebars, you'll feel the torque pulling the tire to either side. That kind of force can move a spacecraft. "Up to now, everybody has thought of satellites as these very large things. And CMGs are large too. Those in the space station are several feet long," Herman says. But the mini CMGs could go up on satellites weighing as little as 6.5 pounds (3 kilograms).

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Extraterrestrial Environment Chambers

In the lab, Honeybee has two environment chambers that can mimic conditions on Mars and on other celestial bodies. They put their gear in the chambers to test how it works at temperatures as low as minus 240 F (minus 150 C) and lower, and pressures of 2- to 12-mm Hg.